Pages

Monday, March 6, 2017

What I'm Reading - The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

The Swerve: How the World Became Modernby Stephen Greenblatt

The Swerve is focused on how the Renaissance came about and in particular the influence of one book that was rediscovered by a Renaissance Italian book collector. De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) is a first-century BC didactic
poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus. On the Nature of Things is Lucretius attempt to explain Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience.

The title and the subtitle of
the book are explained in the author's preface. "The Swerve" refers
to a key conception in the ancient atomistic theories according to which atoms
moving through the void are subject to clinamen: while falling straight through
the void, they are sometimes subject to a slight, unpredictable swerve. This swerve explains how it is that atoms collide and sometimes combine into new forms (rather than remaining as separate particles). The swerve is also used to explain or justify the existence of man's free will and to reconcile with a materialistic, deterministic philosophy.

I was already that several Greek philosophical schools embraced atomism - essentially the view that
the world was composed of tiny particles. I don't recall the explanation for free will, but I also didn't find it especially convincing, but then neither are any of the other explanations or justifications I have seen. But I was unaware of just how
much of what we consider novel, like a theory of evolution, was really a rediscovery or
reimagining of very old ideas.

It makes me wonder much sooner we might have had a fully realized scientific method and all that entails had works like De rerum not been lost for so long?

This subject is a bit before the period of interest for my blog, but ...

Of particular interest from an RPG perspective is the character of a book finder like Poggio Bracciolini. he is highly educated, has experience and connections in the highest levels of society (he was the private secretary to the Pope), now he is a masterless man, he travels widely, independently does the finding and acquisition of rare books, and he in effect works on speculation or commission. Just like a member of your typical party of player characters.

And all would have asked the
obvious question: whom does this man serve?

Poggio himself might have been
hard-pressed for an answer. He had until recently served the pope, as he had
served a succession of earlier Roman pontiffs. His occupation was a scriptor, that is, a skilled writer of
official documents in the papal bureaucracy, and, through adroitness and
cunning, he had risen to the coveted position of apostolic secretary. He was on
hand then to write down the pope’s words, record his sovereign decisions, craft
in elegant Latin his extensive international correspondence. In a formal court
setting, in which physical proximity to the absolute ruler was a key asset,
Poggio was a man of importance. He listened when the pope whispered something
in his ear; he whispered something back; he knew the meaning of the pope’s
smiles and frowns. He had access, as the very word “secretary” suggests, to the
pope’s secrets. And this pope had a great many secrets.

The
Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt, Ch 1, p. 19.

The idea that the central question that people would ask about strangers is who is their master is fairly foreign to our highly individualistic modern society. But the question of whom do you serve is crucial for many campaigns where the PCs are integrated into society rather than being the stereotypical wandering murder hoboes. It is especially important for the high society for cape and sword fantasy. To emphasize,

"In a formal court setting, in which physical proximity
to the absolute ruler was a key asset, Poggio was a man of importance."

To get back to the Poggio the bookfinder, finding and especially the acquisition of rare books would make a great hook or quest for a party of PCs.

Two other interesting ideas in the book were monastic literacy and the widespread practice of silent reading and when it developed (assuming it didn't always exist). I quote a bunch from Greenblatt and then site some others who agree or disagree with the notion that prior to Medieval times people either couldn't or by and large never read silently.

Monastic Literacy

But all monks were expected to
know how to read. In a world increasingly dominated by illiterate warlords,
that expectation, formulated early in the history of monasticism, was of
incalculable importance. Here is the Rule from the monasteries established in
Egypt and throughout the Middle East by the late for the-century Coptic saint
Pachomious. When a candidate for admission to the monastery presents himself to
the elders,

They shall give him twenty Psalms or
two of the Apostles’ epistles or some other part of Scripture. And if he is
illiterate he shall go at the first, third and sixth hours to someone who can
teach and has been appointed for him. He shall stand before him and learn very
studiously and with all gratitude. The fundamentals of a syllable, the verbs
and nouns shall be written for him and even if he does not want to, he shall be compelled to read. (Rule
139)

Ch
2, p. 25

Silent Reading

In Benedict’s time, [the sixth
century] as in antiquity, reading was
ordinarily performed audibly.Ch
2, p. 25

When, where and how did silent
reading develop?

Evidence abounds that ancient
and medieval readers relished giving voice to their favorite texts in order to
appreciate more fully the cadences of Homer and Lucian. Of course, we equally
enjoy reading poetry aloud. The question is: Could the earliest readers
literally not shut up?

Paul Saenger thinks so--but
his argument for the onetime dominance of the spoken word doesn't rest on
Augustine. Saenger, a medieval-manuscript expert and a curator of rare books at
Chicago's Newberry Library, believes that reading aloud wasn't a mere
preference for the ancients, but a practical necessity. His explanation is
simple:

In his provocative new book, Space
Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford), Saenger argues
that the practice of transcribing Greek and Latin manuscripts without spaces,
or in scriptura continua, made reading silently a mind-bogglingly difficult
task. "It wasn't literally impossible
to read silently," Saenger says, "but the notation system was so
awkward that the vast majority of readers would have needed to sound out the
syllables, if only in a muffled voice." Saenger's book asserts that only
at the end of the seventh century, when Irish monks introduced regular word
separation into medieval manuscripts, did swift, silent reading become
feasible.

Having spent the past fifteen
years combing medieval manuscript libraries on both sides of the Atlantic,
Saenger identifies the first properly spaced Latin manuscript as the Irish Book of Mulling, an illuminated
translation of the Gospels dating from around 690 a.d. Indeed, he notes, the
Irish soon adopted the the verb videre, "to see," as a way to
describe reading. In a similar spirit, an Irish monk compared the activity of
reading to a cat silently stalking a mouse.

Over the next couple of
centuries, this Irish innovation spread to other countries--first to England,
then to the Low Countries and the rest of Europe. By the twelfth century,
reports Saenger, murmuring monks had become a relic of the past. (There's no
precise date available, alas, for the first appearance of a SILENCE, PLEASE!
sign.) As reading became a silent activity, new types of manuscripts that took
advantage of this intimacy were produced, from pocket prayer books to erotica.
More important, the intellectual orthodoxy enforced by group readings of
manuscripts melted away as scholars retired to private rooms for quiet study.

This book explains how a
change in writing—the introduction of word separation—led to the development of
silent reading during the period from late antiquity to the fifteenth century.

Why was word separation so
long in coming? The author finds the answer in ancient reading habits with
their oral basis, and in the social context where reading and writing took
place. The ancient world had no desire to make reading easier and swifter. For various
reasons, what modern readers view as advantages—retrieval of reference
information, increased ability to read “difficult” texts, greater diffusion of
literacy—were not seen as advantages in the ancient world. The notion that a
larger portion of the population should be autonomous and self-motivated
readers was entirely foreign to the ancient world’s elitist mentality.

Augustine's description of
Ambrose's silent reading (including the remark that he never read aloud) is the
first definite instance recorded in Western literature. Earlier examples are
far more uncertain. In the fifth century BC, two plays show characters reading
on stage: in Euripides' Hippolytus, Theseus reads in silence a letter held by
his dead wife; in Aristophanes' The Knights, Demosthenes looks at a
writing-tablet sent by an oracle and, without saying out loud what it contains,
seems taken aback by what he has read.6 According to Plutarch, Alexander the
Great read a letter from his mother in silence in the fourth century BC, to the
bewilderment of his soldiers.7 Claudius Ptolemy, in the second century AD,
remarked in On the Criterion (a book that Augustine may have known) that
sometimes people read silently when they are concentrating hard, because
voicing the words is a distraction to thought.8 And Julius Caesar, standing
next to his opponent Cato in the Senate in 63 BC, silently read a little
billet-doux sent to him by Cato's own sister.9 Almost four centuries later, Saint
Cyril of Jerusalem, in a catechetical lecture probably delivered at Lent of the
year 349, entreated the women in church to read, while waiting during the
ceremonies, "quietly, however, so that, while their lips speak, no other
ears may hear what they say"10 -a whispered reading, perhaps, in which the
lips fluttered with muffled sounds.

Until silent reading became the norm in the Christian world, heresies
had been restricted to individuals or small numbers of dissenting
congregations.

Alberto
Manguel, Chapter 2 of A History of Reading (New York; Viking, 1996).

In the end I don't find the idea that ancient people's couldn't read silently convincing. But I think that they probably seldom did read silently. For the various reasons cited. But the idea is an interesting and pretty unusual one for an RPG setting.

So in conclusion, I found The Swerve fascinating, especially how so many aspects of Epicurean doctrine prefigured and align with current scientific views of the universe. On the downside, I think that Greenblatt does not do a sufficiently thorough job of addressing critics of some of his and Lucretius' ideas. But a thorough refutation would have made the book less accessible to a general audience and less likely to be a popular best seller. Similar criticism can be addressed to books that ask us to revise our view of history and the world. But like other books such as Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond or 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus by Charles C. Mann (which I am reading now) this is definitely worth a read.

1 comment:

I've been thinking about reading The Swerve and after seeing this I probably will. I tracked down an article he'd written in the New Yorker and I enjoyed that.

Poggio is just crying out to be incorporated into a game either as an NPC or the inspiration for somebody's character. As for silent reading, I think the idea of text that cannot be read silently is rather appealing.